Bloody head trip, part two

The best horror isn’t about the jump scare — it’s about pulling the reality rug out from underneath you, leaving you questioning what’s real and what’s not. And leaving you with the chilling realization that you have absolutely zero control over any of it.

Back in 2014, Tango Gameworks got that part of the equation right with The Evil Within, a head-tripping story about a grizzled detective who watched his simple murder investigation mutate into a reality-bending gore-fest that left him a shaken shell. Unfortunately, that’s about all that was right about the game: The rest was a head-slapping monster mash of frustration, with a bunch of would-be survival strategies that never quite seemed to work set against a parade of uber-creepy but impossible–to-beat boss monsters.

Like a slasher picking off teens in a cliched horror flick, the sequel fixes all the original’s shortcomings with a precision that’s as shocking as it is surgical. The Evil Within 2’s tagline may be “The only way out is in,” but it might as well be “The answer to everything is an open world.”

A grunting blank in the first game, our hero, Detective Sebastian Castellanos, is barely better here. But at least he has a motivation we can get behind this time. Turns out his cute little daughter, thought dead in a house fire, is alive and trapped inside STEM, the virtual reality machine unleashed by the nefarious Mobius Corporation in the original game.

More specifically, she’s stuck in Union, the Mayberry-like town STEM created to unite all our minds. Instead, it’s turning its denizens into oozing, murderous monsters. (Damned technology upgrades.) Sebastian’s gotta go in and save her.

The original game was like a haunted house, steering you down hallways into rooms where you’d find yourself trapped. Moving to an open-world structure gives you both power and options. You’ll both want and need to explore every inch of Union’s quickly crumbling infrastructure, and the game will reward you for doing so — with critical parts and supplies to upgrade your weapons and abilities, and with a surprising array of unexpected creepazoid encounters big and small. Don’t skip the copious side missions you’ll be offered along the blood-slicked way, and don’t make the mistake of thinking an area’s been cleared. Because it most definitely hasn’t.

Reality, meanwhile, is as tenuous as ever, starting with Sebastian’s initial encounter with one of the game’s main villains, a photographer who enjoys using his time-stop abilities to stage grotesque murder scenes. One minute you’re in his studio of grue, the next you’re back in the original game’s Beacon Hospital, the next you’re somewhere else altogether. Mirrors and computer screens are your portals to god knows what, always leaving you edgy and unsure of what horror lurks on the other side. Now that’s scary.

Evil Within 2 is rated M and available for $59.99 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.